by James Grady
Cari spotted one customer, a man in a suit and tie transfixed by the wall under the BONDAGE section sign. She stepped behind him and puckered her lips: blew a soft wind that mussed his hair.
Suit-and-tie whirled, saw real woman, his eyes going wide…
As she waved her credentials: “I’ve got handcuffs.”
The customer cupped his hand over his face, stumbled past us to the front door, blasted the buzzer, vanished into where he dared to be seen.
“It’s time for your dues and don’ts,” I told the cashier. Smoke from the cigarette in his hand curled towards the ceiling. I waved the credential folder from Cari’s youngest gunman and the cashier wand-muted the TV. “We’re with your united way.”
“Federal division.” Zane flashed credentials from the man he’d garbage canned.
The credentials’ insignias said FBI, and they were true, even if the men who’d carried them plus their credentials from two other federal agencies had been liars.
Liars like us, but the cashier bought us with a blink of his hollow eyes, a purchase helped along by the glimpse I gave him of the cop gun holstered on my belt.
“Already gave,” said the cashier. “Mostly locals, but we got points.”
“Not with our team,” said Zane. “We’re a whole new league. You get to play.”
The cashier sucked fire all the way down the white tube in his fingers. “Or?”
“Or we call in our other teams,” I said. “IRS. Kiddie porn task force. Money laundry masters. Missing Persons hounds with computers that age and match photos. The Racket Boys who lost most of their budget to us and are hungry for an easy lunch.”
“Mostly, though,” said Cari, her eyes nailing him, “we’ll make it personal.”
“Right now,” I said. “We don’t know you. And you don’t want to know us.”
“I just work the place.”
“We don’t care,” said Zane. “You’re who we got.”
The cashier stubbed out his cigarette on the counter. “What are we talking about?”
“What’s upstairs?” I said.
“Storeroom. Old desk, couple chairs. Boxes of shit. The bathroom.”
“Sounds swell,” I said.
Zane said: “Now it’s ours. For as long as we want it.”
“And,” said Cari. “Nobody knows we’re up there. Not your loser customers. Not your boss or the owner on paper or the real owners or the mall manager. We got a big crew. You forget us all forever. Nobody knows we’re here, not even you.”
“What if I gotta go the can?”
Zane said: “Raise your hand.”
“Fuckin’ cops,” he said. “You’re all alike.”
“What are your store hours?” I said.
“They’re me. I get here long ’bout 11 for the lunch crowd. Close little after the late night snack crew. If I get the hungers, I trade tit-for-tat with the pizza delivery place or with the noodle shop slopes from couple doors up. I ain’t feeding you, too.”
“We bring in breakfast,” I said, “so we need a set of keys and the alarm codes.”
“Keys cost.”
I dropped two $20 bills on the counter.
The bills went in his pocket, a ring of keys went in mine. Cari wrote the cashier’s recitation of alarm code punch numbers on the back of a rental receipt.
“One more thing,” I said.
“It’s always one more thing with guys like you.”
“Blue neon makes a nice sign,” I said, “but why COYOTES?”
“Cut Off Your Old Tightass Existence Store.”
I said: “You spelled tight-ass wrong.”
His zippo clicked fire to a white coffin nail. “It figures you know that.”
We let the toxic cloud he exhaled blow our sails towards the back curtain.
“Refreshing to meet an honest man,” I said when we stood in the upstairs office of the porno store. “It’s exactly as shitty up here as he said it was.”
“But you were right,” said Zane as we pushed aside piles of cardboard boxes, spun two metal folding chairs away from the scarred metal desk and put them next to the windows. “Even dirty as it is, this glass gives us a clear view.”
Zane stood in the window and trained the compact binoculars from the weapons vest across Georgia Avenue, over whooshing past cars and down at Mail 4 U!
“I can almost read Trish’s lips while she’s talking on her cell phone,” he said.
“Me, too,” I said, my eyes hanging around Cari. “Right now, she’s saying ‘like’.”
Zane shook his head. “So many people out here in the real world talk about themselves as if they were ‘like’ characters in a some movie.”
“Everybody needs some handle on life,” I said.
“What’s ours?” asked Zane.
Suddenly an electronically amplified woman’s voice vibrated the floor beneath our feet: “Wow! Like, I never dreamed that two hunky guys would be my new neighbors! Come in.”
Our upstairs trio blinked.
Zane said: “He will turn off the TV.”
Cari sighed. “Cover is cover. That loud, the downstairs creeps can’t hear us.”
“I was just going to take a shower. Want to join me?”
I held the cell phone close to my mouth as I punched the number programmed for Beta. Russell answered, and I said: “In position. Go.”
“Oh yeah.”
Five minutes later, a brown uniformed deliveryman walked down Georgia Avenue. The deliveryman carried a five-foot-long cardboard tube over his right shoulder. White tape randomly circled the brown cardboard tube—logically and rationally for more purposes than just to give the tube distinctive stripes.
“An oversized cardboard tube is the perfect spy tool,” I said as we watched Russell walk towards Mail 4 U! “Carry it on your shoulder and you’ve got a reason for being anywhere, for going anywhere. Hell, bend your knees when you walk to show that the tube is heavy, and guards will even open the doors for you.”
“Don’t count on Trish getting off her ass,” said Zane, binoculars trained across the store. “Do you think she’ll recognize that I just bought the tube and label there?”
“Not a chance,” I said.
“Mmm. Now it’s my turn.”
“In and out,” said Zane, narrating the scenes he watched through binoculars. “Come on, Russell! What are you doing? Trish stashed the tube perfectly, tagged and propped against the wall right where we can see it, put a pink slip in the mail box… What are you—No! Don’t talk with the manager!”
“Un-hun.”
Four minutes later, Russell walked out of Mail 4 U! Stood in front of the glass windows, his face towards Georgia Avenue and our second-story post across the street as he made a big deal about checking his watch. Walking away.
Two minutes after that, from the white Caddy with Hailey and Eric, he called my cell phone. I punched it on.
“Oh baby un-huh do that to me.”
“Vic?” said Russell in the cell phone. “Who do I hear?”
“Never mind! What were you doing? You were supposed to go in and out!”
“Yeah baby.”
“Ah… OK, but I killed two birds with one brown. I told the manager I had a pick up at some motel near a subway stop on Georgia Ave’, but I forgot to write down which one. He told me where motels are two miles down the road back in D.C. And it’s not like the manager will ever see me again. If he does… Nobody remembers deliverymen.”
“That’s so good.”
“OK,” I told Russell. “Recon them, find the one that will hide the Caddy the best. Get a couple—no, get three rooms, register us as the Harry Martin family reunion. Have Eric figure out shift rotations so… um…”
“So Blondie is never only with only one of us,” said Russell.
“Oh yeah! Un-hun! I’ve never done it like this!”
Russell cell phoned: “Hey, Vic, whatever you’re doing, I can’t wait for my turn.”
46
We sat on metal folding chairs beside the porno store’s upstairs window and put binoculars on whoever walked out of the afternoon and into Mail 4 U!
“What time is it?” said Zane, his eyes on our stakeout.
I glanced at my watch: “Four forty-two.”
“Rush hour.” Cari looked out and down at the stream of cars passing by. “Lucky people, going home.”
“We’ll get there,” I told her.
“What if nobody picks up your tube?” she said.
“Hell,” said Zane. “What if somebody does pick it up? Taxis don’t cruise around here. Our chase car is at a motel 20 minutes away. We spot the pick up, most we’ll get is a visual of the guy, maybe a license plate. Unless he takes a bus or hikes to the subway, we won’t be able to follow him or snatch him.”
“We got what we got,” I said.
Cari swung out of her black cloth blazer, draped it across the back of her folding chair. She wore Hailey’s cashmere pullover. That too-tight red sweater stretched over Cari’s no bra breasts and I didn’t think about Nurse Death’s five eyes or inflated flesh featured in the TV playing under our shoes. Cari had Nurse Death’s unloaded Walther PPK tucked into her belt, cosmetic armament for her fake role as a federal agent.
She combed her fingers through short blonde hair, stretched—could have used the stretch as prelude to an attack, but didn’t. The stench of ammonia drifted from the bathroom. She looked at me: I gave her a comforting smile.
Zane swung the binoculars up to watch the mail drop store.
Four minutes later said: “Customer. Went to his mail box, found nothing, left.”
“I never know whether to be glad or sad when my mail box is empty,” said Cari.
I said: “He could have been a scout.”
Zane joked a Marlon Brando boxing movie line: “I could-a been a contender.”
Cari watched Zane and I share a smile. Said: “What’s it like to be crazy?”
“Same as it is for you,” said Zane. “Everybody’s different. Yet also the same.”
“It takes guts to be nuts.” I shrugged.
“Being crazy is living in a dream,” I said. “But maybe out here is the dream and crazy is what’s real. What matters is what you can make work.”
“Plus what makes you happy,” said Zane.
“Happy?” said Cari. “Babbling on street corners? Locked up in a padded cell?”
I told Zane: “She knows about Condor.”
“You call that happy?” said Cari, neither confirming nor denying what I’d said.
“One man’s happy is another man’s Hell,” I said. “And you’d be surprised what people get used to. But where we were… I call that trying.”
“Trying is where everybody starts.” Zane shrugged. “Since we busted out, since I made it through the subway meltdown—”
“What subway meltdown?” interrupted Cari.
“Never mind, he got by with a little help from his friends.”
“Sure, obvious things made me crazy.” Zane’s eyes probed beyond the glass. “My parents’ car wreck. Jumping out of an airplane to get hung up in war tree and watch a man I treasured die because of my great idea. Baking like I was in the Hell the nuns promised me. The dig-my-own-grave mindfuck. Tons of bombs blasting my nerves. Getting so fried with fear and pain that my hair turned white. Being smeared with heroin, packed out of the jungle like a monkey. All that whacked me, but hey: everybody gets a load.”
A truck honked outside on Georgia Avenue.
“What kept me crazy was believing in my bones that I had to carry that load forever. I fought with everything I had to hold onto the weight that was crushing me. Carry that weight, no matter what, and never, never cry. Or else.”
Cari said: “Or else what?”
“If you let go of your weight, you got nothing.” Zane stared out porno’s window. “Some people need to get down to nothing. “Me, I melted down in the subway where Vic and Russell and strangers changed the moment and kept me from going batshit. Going batshit is another way of holding on to your weight. But them being there stopped me from going batshit. So I had to let go, and when I could breathe again, I was still hanging on to a moving train. My crying and letting go didn’t destroy the universe. So while I was in the same place… it wasn’t the same me.
“Dr. F getting whacked led me to zero,” said Zane. The window reflected his sad smile. “Kind of rough on him, but Dr. F was my best ever penny.”
Zane took a quick look at Mail 4 U! through the binoculars. Put them down on the window ledge and asked Cari: “What about you?”
“I’m not crazy.”
“Are you glad or sad your crazy mail box is empty?”
“Irrelevant,” said Cari. “Instead of me nailing my mission, my mission has nailed me. Doesn’t matter if I’m crazy or not, I screwed up and so I am screwed.”
“I don’t know about screwed,” said Zane, “but you didn’t screw up. You’ve been dealing with what’s real, not what was expected. I’d say that makes you a star.”
She stared at him.
“But do you know what’s important right now?” asked Zane.
Cari shook her head.
“Crazy or not, we need to eat.”
And I saw my chance: “There’s that Vietnamese restaurant a few doors down.”
“Saigon’s everywhere out here. Makes sense for me to get dinner.” Zane passed me the binoculars. Asked Cari: “Can I bring you anything in particular?”
“Make it hot, make it a lot.”
As the door downstairs buzzed Zane’s exit, Cari said: “Was he always like this?”
“Yes. No.”
She took his chair. We stared out the smudged glass window. Alone.
“So…” My gesture took in the cluttered second floor of our pornography palace, the traffic rushing in the street below, sunset’s bleeding sky. “How you doing?”
“Well… Way back when, I never pictured being in a place like this.”
“Who did?” I said. “Americans usually mean high school when they talk about back when. For the rest of the world, back when is usually either when they had food or when they didn’t. What was way back when for you?”
“Yesterday. Forget about high school.” She shook her head. “High school is America’s cradle. We always believe we can re-birth ourselves into a new person—smarter, prettier, richer, more powerful. In the rest of the world, people struggle to be better and safer in who they already are. That’s why way back when for us springs from our adolescent daze. We keep thinking we still got time to grow up and be somebody else.”
“Who do you want to grow up to be?” I said.
“Alive.” She lowered the binoculars. Kept her gaze out the window. “All there.”
“And here isn’t how you pictured there.”
“Got that right,” she said. “Back then, all I wanted was out. To go somewhere special. Do something more than ordinary life. Do what nobody thought I could.”
She laughed. “So guess what? Now I risk my ass to protect ‘ordinary life.’ And what do I get for ‘special’? Trapped above a porno store with a couple of maniacs.”
Cari put the binoculars on the window ledge.
“The real joke is that ordinary life finally makes sense.” She gave me a wry smile. “But hey, I’m just a girl with no bullets in her gun.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Next do you want my horoscope sign? Wasn’t the stars that got me here.”
“Suburbia? The city? Small town? A farm?”
“Ah: persistence. Dull the resistant edge of your captive by bonding with her over details of her life
.”
Risk everything: “If you want to walk away… go.”
Her green eyes didn’t blink. Neither did I.
“Nah,” she said. “I’d miss dinner.”
Our eyes went across the street to the glowing lights of Mail 4 U!
“Iowa,” she said.
My heart slammed against my ribs. “Are you married?”
“You know better than that.”
“Is there… Do you have somebody?”
“You can always have somebody.” Her blonde head shook. “There’s nobody.”
“Me, either.”
“That’s no news flash.”
“That’s what we miss in this spy life,” I said. “The chance to find anybody who’s more than somebody.”
“You always figure there’s time,” she said. “Even knowing what you and I know about time. In 11 seconds, I can kill a man—and that’s hand-to-hand. Give me bullets for my gun, and forget about point blank: if I see him, I own him.”
“We’re all a blink away from the last bullet,” I said. “Look where I am.”
“Don’t think I don’t think about that. We all do. But when we hear about… crashes like you, we say it was just your time.”
“Time changes.”
“And grinds up people in the gears.”
“I’m still here.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But I tried to nail you. I tried real hard.”
“Better luck next time.”
She blinked.
“Do you like poetry?”
“I never think about it.”
“Then you’re lucky. You’ve got a lot to learn, and… and…”
What, what happened?
“Victor! Vic!” Cari’s leaning right in front of me and I’m still sitting in the hard chair, the window’s turning dark now but she’s leaning close to me, off her chair…
“Vic! You… zoned out.”
“But I’m back. I always come back.”
“So far. How long have you guys been off your meds?”
“Russell would say not long enough. Don’t worry. We’ll make it.”
“Even Eric and Hailey?”
“Together they add up to a whole.”
